Introducing Children to Computers?

Years ago, kids could be gradually introduced to computers through learning languages like LOGO and educational computer games. Many of us started our computing careers at our parent's workplace, logged in to a word processor to type away, only to become fascinated with the whole computing thing. So Slashdot, let's hear how you were lured into the digital life. What was it that drew you to a life of programming? How old were you when you first used a computer? What pieces of modern software do you think would be a good way to introduce today's kids to the world of computing? Two of our readers had a few related questions: "A family friend has asked me to help teach her 13-year-old the art of computer programming. I initially thought this would be easy to approach but times have changed since I cut my teeth on text-only, ROM-based, BASIC interpreters. Twenty years ago, it seems there were much more clear and concise paths one could take to learn programming. Now I'm at a loss as to what language and resources I should use. Everything is so high-level that I'm having trouble finding convenient, simple tools that promote the fundamental tenets of programming, allowing newbies to jump in and see immediate results, without getting bogged down in corporate-centric APIs. It seems nowadays most programmers end up spending more time learning the development environment (and thus being confined to specific platforms) than core, transferrable programming knowledge. I'd like to ask my fellow Slashdot dwellers what tools, languages and approaches they have used to help introduce new people to programming?", and from sagefire.org: "My daughter is a huge fan of TuxPaint and ChildsPlay. We use Linux and MacOSX (and occasionally Windows) on different computers. We like to have stuff for her installed wherever we go. The two I mentioned go a long way, but we would love to pick the collective Slashdot brain on this one."

Comments

Linux, the open OS.

[garcia]

My first memory of using a computer was plugging a HUGE game cartridge into the back of my family's Vic20 and being in some castle (like Dracula's Castle or some shit). It was a text adventure game that I really never mastered. I think I was about three years old.

My father started me writing programs in BASIC before I was four (as that was what he was doing and of course I wanted to know how). I could read most things by then and this was not much more than just copying what he did anyway. I mostly remember playing around with simple things like PRINT, GOTO, and INPUT. Nothing very complex although I suspect (but don't know for sure) that my father never did anything terribly complex in BASIC.

We progressed through the Commodore stages (C64, C64C?, C128D) and when I was in 7th grade we upgraded to a Packard Bell 386SX-16 with a whopping 2MB of RAM and a 40MB HD. This is where my love of computers really started... I sat down my first day and discovered the DOS prompt (PBs at the time had a simple GUI menu that basically sucked) but quickly found myself unable to load anything from the 3.5" disks.

LOAD "*",8,1 was giving me "Bad command or file name" repeatedly... Dejected, I sat down and read the DOS 5.0 manual from front to back (several times actually). I spent time writing crap in Q-Basic (and eventually QuickBasic) and then moved on to Turbo C++ (which I must say had a far less interesting manual than DOS believe it or not ;))

What I enjoyed most of all (and I have posted about that on Slashdot before) was thumbing through the old-school Computer Shopper looking to build my dream machine and making sure I priced it the best I could.

I miss the days of old-school computing when everyone knew at least some part of what was going on inside their machines and the OS even allowed you to! I missed that part of computers until I moved to Linux in 1996.

I'm just glad that with Linux I can continue to allow it to remain that way. I can forever live in the world that I had grown up in. So to answer your question about what I would do to introduce a child to a computer... Linux!

Linux allows you to get right down there in the trenches with your machine. You get to see what the hell is going on when it boots up. Sure, most people don't care (because they don't have to) but we all grew up watching DOS boot before Windows. We knew how to edit config files and save on what little memory we had so that we could run NewGameFoo.

I enjoyed learning about computers and playing around and finding out how they ticked. It scares me that NO ONE will know how soon as Windows does NOT really allow you to know. Everything is behind a shroud of secrecy and hard to find registry settings that are buried in deep trees of information.

At least with Linux a child gets the best of both worlds. A modern operating system GUI with nearly all the comforts of Windows while still being able to learn if they want to.

But that's just me. I learn by doing not by example. Using a computer that is open to explore was the best option for me.

YMMV.

Re:Linux, the open OS.

[Pfhreakaz0id]

As a person who has spent some time programming and troubleshooting windows, I'll throw out my favorite saying "The more you learn about Windows, the more you are amazed it works at all".

Seriously, I remember troubleshooting a boot/registry problem and I got this freeware/shareware program to log all registry activity. It would even do it for a whole boot. At the time, a win2k boot had between 120,000 and 150,000 registry read/writes!!!

Lego Mindstorms

[LWATCDR]

What more can I say. Let's face it kids today are not going to write a video game to be proud of today like they could back in the Apple/64/Atari day.
However something like mindstorms is fun and accessible. Also a good way to get your feet wet programming.

I've been teaching programming using Flash

[jbum]

One of the nice thing about early 80s PCs was that the individual pixels were large. So you could accomplish a lot with a simple program like this one (which I often entered into floor models at the local radio shack):

10 COLOR RND(15)
20 SET(RND(20),RND(20))
30 GOTO 10

Sadly, it is harder to find programming environments for kids that provide this kind of simplicity these days.

Last year I started teaching high school aged kids to make simple videogames using Flash. My class is called "Make your own videogame in Flash Actionscript". Essentially, my class is an introduction to programming, and something of a "stealth math class." I would much prefer to be using BASIC on old VIC-20s, but Flash isn't too bad for this activity.

I'm aware of the huge anti-Flash sentiment on Slashdot - one I generally share when I see it needlessly used on websites. However, I think Flash is pretty good for teaching kids to program.

Since it's vector based, the equivalent code to produce the effect of the above (raster based) BASIC program is too large (see http://krazydad.com/bestiary/index2.html for my implementation), so I have had to rethink how I approach things. I have to start with programs that are simple in Flash, not programs that were simple for me in 1981.

Still, I have to spend a couple classes getting past some unnecessary high-level concepts integral to Flash (like "timelines" and "the stage") but eventually we do get down to programming.

When a kid writes that first program in which they can control something on the screen, they invariably yell "Yes!!" or "Alright!!" This is why I like teaching programming.

The reasons I chose Flash, over something like LOGO (or Squeak) are:

• It provides a hands-on enviroment for the kids to paste in their own artwork and manipulate it without yet knowing how to code.
  
• It's possible to make some very simple games that look good without a huge amount of coding.
• The kids can share their games with others by publishing them on a website.
  
• It's a real-world technology that may get them a job or money.
  

Females are so different

[Specabecca]

I grew up in a geeky home with both a dad and older brother consumed with computers.. yet it was not something I wanted to be a part of until I hit college. Females take to computers in a whole different way. I didn't care how to do the little tasks here and there, like fixing little problems that I deemed 'computer janitor' type jobs that periodically sprung up when I was doing basic gaming and word processing. What I wanted to know was the big picture. I needed things explained to me in terms I could understand/ relate to. Something like 'computer story time' would have sparked my interest when I was little, breaking down how the various components communicate with one another and what their jobs were inside the computer first on a broad scale, then breaking it down into finer pieces as time passes. Starting a task like 'ok, we are going to install a new nic into the computer' and explaining WHY you are doing it before you do it, what it does, etc and then displaying the results in a meaningful fashion might useful too. Long story short, fixing something because it is borken just didn't excite me. It doesn't excite a lot of females. Fixing something with a story, with a purpose, with results you can prove to her after the fact.. now that's exciting.